Daily Archives: February 6, 2012

Slimming Down for Bikini Season

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Who, What, Why: Is the Earth getting lighter?

Using some back-of-the-envelope-style calculations, Dr Smith, with help from physicist and Cambridge University colleague Dave Ansell, drew up a balance sheet of what’s coming in, and what’s going out. All figures are estimated.

One questionable part of the analysis:

“Nasa has calculated that the Earth is gaining about 160 tonnes a year because the temperature of the Earth is going up. If we are adding energy to the system, the mass must go up,” says Dr Smith.
…
[T]he Earth’s core is like a giant nuclear reactor that is gradually losing energy over time, and that loss in energy translates into a loss of mass.

But this is a tiny amount – he estimates no more than 16 tonnes a year.

The energy from decay should be included with the global warming — in order to count this as lost mass, the energy has to radiate away from the earth, or else the mass doesn’t change. Which means it’s all part of the global warming energy balance. But since it’s in the round-off error, whether they broke this out as a separate line item or not has little effect on the overall answer.

SevenUpping, Episode III

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One of the sessions that I really enjoyed at ScienceOnline 2012 was It’s Good to be the King, which was a discussion cast in the context of some Mel Brooks clips, which I thought was a clever way to shape the discussion.

The first clip was from Young Frankenstein, where Dr. Frankenstein meets Igor at the train station, and they go through the name pronunciation scene (FrankenSTEIN vs FRANKenstein, and EEgor vs EYEgor), and the upshot of this was that you get to choose your own identity in the blogohedron. How you blog and what you blog about is up to you. You can even be Frau Blücher, if what you want to do is elicit whinnying with everything you post.

Next up was a scene from Robin Hood: Men in Tights that involved some fumbling about with the language and ending with an allusion to the many incarnations of the movie. The idea that wordplay is good in posts and it’s okay to do something that’s been done before if you give it your own slant. Other items discussed were the use of pop-culture references and punny post titles (Gee, I should give that a try)

Blazing Saddles was next, with the scene where Bart says that it’s “getting pretty damn dull around here.” Obviously, you don’t want to fall into a blogging rut, for both your sake and that of your audience.

This was followed by Dracula, Dead and Loving It (which I have not seen, so I was not familiar with the scene) where one character drives a stake into the vampire and gallons of blood gush out with each blow. The premise here was that Mel Brooks liked to repeat a joke well past its peak, but with the over-repetition it would (usually) become funny again. The lesson was that you shouldn’t be afraid to re-blog content, if you have a new take on it.

Spaceballs followed, with the scene where president Skroob gets teleported with his head on backwards, and asks “Why didn’t somebody tell me my ass was so big?” The topic here was criticism, and how to solicit it. You need, and should want, honest feedback on your writing, and unsolicited feedback is usually not of the constructive sort, so you may have to specifically ask for it from select individuals.

The last segment was “It’s good to be the king” from History of the World, Part I. Don’t get too comfortable being the king — don’t get set in your ways, and remember that the content is really the king.